FinTech Pulse

Earlier this week, I was invited to speak at an event called Women In FinTech Initiative (WIFI), a conference held at FinTank - Chicago’s FinTech Hub - to provide visibility, community, and resources for women in the financial technology industry.

As you can imagine, with a room full of female attendees, there was much debate with many engaging conversations on how to be successful when designing solutions with them in mind and how to better drive inclusion for the 51% of the planet; women.

Legislation changes would not suffice if they weren't accompanied by technological advances. Thankfully, the technology race started years ago and it's in a more than solid enough state for the legislation to accommodate.

Oscar Sala, VP of Product Strategy at Strands, Member of the Board of Mobey Forum and co-chair of their Open Banking Working Group, has extensive experience in digital transformation in retail and corporate banking, contributing in particular to the transformation of several companies within Grupo Caixabank, where he was instrumental in the development of new digital banking services, and the application of Fintech methods to ‘disrupt’ the status quo of the financial sector.

Oscar currently defines the product strategy at Strands, alongside the product management team, helping to consolidate the company as the Fintech partner for banks around the world.

Women decide on some 80% of all purchases across the board and are the main owners of 52% of bank accounts, yet they do not feel understood, satisfied, or that their needs are being met by banks or financial institutions. We have discovered that the vast majority of women feel detached from the world of finance, its culture and jargon, putting them at a disadvantage when it comes to taking control of their financial futures, and making daily decisions with a sense of security. In short, banks do not connect with women.

A lack of financial education, poorly-targeted messages and a male-dominated conversation mean that women are misinformed and worry more than men about their finance wellbeing. What Should the Woman-Friendly Bank Offer?

Sandra Real is a Data Engineer Team Lead at STRANDS. Her career has revolved around the analytics industry and the development and use of data technologies for more than fourteen years, and she is a firm believer that there’s nothing more dynamite than data.

With a focus on Oracle Databases, Sandra’s expertise in data architecture, administration, and implementation has grown significantly as DBA at Hewlett Packard, NexTReT and TIPSA. She’s a programmer and all-round dataholic.

But that’s not all. Sandra is refreshingly honest, mother to a three-year-old son, and a total tour de force. Here’s her story: